"I don’t feel like I’m doing the real work, but through my songs I can bring attention to these issues, hopefully helping to make the world a better place—or at least keep it from getting worse so fast.

My travels don’t show up too much on this album, except on the song "Each One Lost" and the instrumental "Ancestors," which I wrote following a trip to Kandahar, Afghanistan under the auspices of the Canadian army.

It was a very deep and emotional experience—one of the saddest things I’ve ever had the privilege to witness, and I wanted to let listeners know how it felt.

"[4] On another song, "Call Me Rose," he writes from the point of view of Richard Nixon, reincarnated as a single mother living in the projects.

"[3] He said he had been angered by an earlier campaign by a member of the Bush administration to bring back the image of Richard Nixon.

They kept doing this for a couple months and then all of a sudden it just disappeared; which suggested to me that somebody had paid to get this campaign going and once it hadn’t born fruit just cut it off.

Other than the fact that he made a very important gesture in terms of establishing communications with China—there’s no taking that away from him—he was a crook and a scumbag and no one should think otherwise.

So the title came from something one of the Canadian soldiers said to me while we were standing there watching—what I learned was kind of a nightly pleasure for a lot of people on the base—the jet fighters taking off constantly, twenty-four hours a day, for missions or patrols.

"[5] In a review for Allmusic, critic Thom Jurek wrote "Cockburn's words have always held keen insight when pointed at the world, but these cut away the outside and look in the mirror first.

There are some fine instrumentals here, too... Small Source of Comfort, which—for all its economy—is abundant in wisdom, empathy, and acceptance; further, it is illuminated beautifully in a deeply personal, even iconic, musical language.

"[6] Joseph Jon Lanthier of Slant Magazine wrote "With the meditative bemusement and ever-changing geographic backdrops of a pilgrim, Bruce Cockburn is arguably at his best when recollecting intense observations in tranquility... his humane snapshots are no less vivid now, but he seems unprecedentedly distant from their emotional heft.

"[7] PremiereGuitar.com praised the album: "Cockburn's shimmering arpeggios, syncopated riffs, and hypnotic single-note lines blend elements of Mississippi John Hurt, Jerry Garcia, Leo Kottke, and Brazilian greats Luiz Bonfa and Oscar Castro-Neves, yet remain entirely his own.